Torture Bred Lies on Iraq, Delayed Killing Bin Laden: Interview

By Zinta Lundborg -
Sep 14, 2011

Ali Soufan spent his years at the
FBI (1997-2005) tracking down terrorists and thwarting plots.

Soufan, who was born in Lebanon in 1971, then worked at
Rudolph Giuliani’s security consulting business before setting
up his own shop, The Soufan Group, which provides training and
strategic analysis for clients ranging from police departments
to government leaders.

His book, “The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and
the War Against al-Qaeda,” is a personal look at what went
right and what went really wrong during the “war on terror.”

Lundborg: I was surprised how much detail you had gathered
early on about al-Qaeda, an organization generally regarded as
opaque and difficult to penetrate.

Soufan: I find it frustrating when people say about 9/11:
“We never knew what hit us.”

Oh, we knew. We’d been tracking them around the world, even
before the East African embassy bombings. We actually named bin Laden and al-Qaeda in a sealed indictment in June of 1998.

Lundborg: You successfully thwarted them at that time?

The Big ‘If’

Soufan: We disrupted their network in London, Albania,
Italy, and ended up in Manchester, where we found the famous
“Manchester Manual” for terrorist training.

And after the bombing of the USS Cole, we were able to put
together a new blueprint of their organization. Then you go to
the tragic events of Sept. 11.

Lundborg: You say those attacks might have been prevented
if you’d gotten the info you requested from the CIA when you
asked for it.

Soufan: If information was shared, 9/11 could have been a
different day. There’s a big “if” here.

It’s not just me: The executive summary of the CIA
Inspector General, or the 9/11 Commission report made it clear
that if they’d passed along that information to the FBI, the
State Department and to Immigration and Naturalization Services
and put these individuals on a no-fly list, a lot of things
could have happened that might have stopped 9/11.

Lundborg: Why didn’t they?

Soufan: I still don’t have an answer. I don’t buy the
“connect-the-dots” theory or the Chinese Wall. Maybe it’s
totally incompetency on the part of people over there.

Soufan: We were against it, reporting there was no
connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda.

Unfortunately, as we know now from the Senate Armed
Services Committee, torture produced results from Ibn al-Shaykh
al-Liby, that Saddam and al-Qaeda were working on WMDs. Colin
Powell went to the United Nations with that.

We later found out this was not true. When we asked al-Liby
why he’d lied, he said ‘I gave you what you wanted to hear to
make the torture stop.’ We ended up in a disaster.

Lundborg: Why was torture so popular during the Bush years?

Soufan: It was certainly driven by Washington, not the
field. They may have been acting out of fear in a knee-jerk
reaction.

Lundborg: Does torture ever work?

Soufan: Not in a democracy, but in a country where anything
is possible, you may be able to break a person. Even so, you
don’t know whether what they give you is accurate or not.

There’s a big difference between compliance and
cooperation.

What Happened?

Lundborg: Your interrogation of the terrorist Batar might
have led to finding bin Laden much sooner. What happened?

Soufan: It was a lead. The guy was connected to the Yemeni
wife that we knew was with bin Laden. The families are
connected, they’re from the same town. He’s the guy who
delivered the dowry, who brought her and her family to
Afghanistan for the wedding with bin Laden.

He wanted to make a phone call home to check on his family.
We thought it was a great opportunity, because you never know
who the family will call afterwards. We couldn’t get permission
so he stopped talking.

Lundborg: Why say no?

Soufan: We don’t know. We were told Paul Wolfowitz (then
deputy secretary of defense) said no.

Lundborg: What do you make of the death of bin Laden?

Soufan: It’s done great damage to al-Qaeda. It was a
success ten years too late.

We knew about this Kuwaiti courier who finally led to bin
Laden, but we didn’t follow him because Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
said he wasn’t important.

If after 183 sessions of waterboarding KSM says he’s not
important, he must not be important. He misled us. Torture
doesn’t work.

No Challenges

Lundborg: What parts of your book did the CIA censor?

Soufan: Anything that had to do with the narrative of what
produced information.

You don’t redact lies. They’re censoring the truth because
they don’t want the narrative to be challenged.